Poll workers muddle election

Some will not be asked to come back

Nov. 15, 2012

Written by

Barry M. Horstman

With about 3,000 poll workers at 545 polling places throughout Hamilton County, human errors are inevitable, board of elections chairman Tim Burke concedes.

On Election Day, some of those poll workers proved Burke right.

In Forest Park, a Republican poll worker apparently mistook a precinct voter registration document for a list of voters who had requested absentee ballots, an error that improperly required about two dozen individuals to have to cast a provisional ballot.

At another polling spot, two workers were removed from their posts after agreeing to register at least one voter and simultaneously allowing her to vote, a clear violation of Ohio election law. Some poll workers asked for multiple forms of identification when one is sufficient.

And despite expanded training this year, other poll workers were confused about when and how to use provisional ballots, cast when voters’ eligibility is questioned, often after they move or change their name without updating their voter registration.

“I don’t know what they got out of that extra training,” said Jennifer Meador, who was among those erroneously required to vote provisionally in Forest Park. “I think the day they had training some of them must have gone out for a long coffee and doughnut break.”

After the elections board completes its official count of the Nov. 6 election later this month, it will spend the next several months reviewing poll workers’ performances based on Election Day compliments or complaints from voters and forms on which workers may judge one another.

That review, Burke said, will produce some poll staffing changes by the next election.

“Some people won’t be working with us again on Election Day,” Burke said.

Among the incidents that the elections board will examine, the Forest Park incident perhaps tops the list.

Mary Schubauer-Berigan, a Democratic observer at the polling place at Word of Deliverance church, said the problem appeared to stem from a GOP poll worker mistaking a registration record for a list of voters who had requested an absentee ballot and cast an early vote in the final days before Nov. 6.

The poll worker, Schubauer-Berigan said, hand-printed the words “absentee voted” next to names in the poll book that voters sign before casting a ballot.

While each of the roughly 25 people affected insisted they had not asked for or cast an absentee ballot, that designation required them to vote provisionally – a step taken in this case to give election officials time to verify that individuals had not voted twice.

“People were very upset,” Schubauer-Berigan said. “Some thought someone had maybe impersonated them and voted early, and others thought they were being disenfranchised. No one was casual about it and just said, ‘Oh, gee, I guess I’ll just have to vote a provisional.’ ”

Leslie Haxby McNeill, who along with her husband had to vote provisionally at the Forest Park precinct, said she was upset over “being told I had done something I knew I hadn’t.”

The highlighted “absentee” notation next to her name, she said, appeared to be typewritten, suggesting that there may have been an error in the registration books sent to the polling place.

“That’s what’s fishy,” said Haxby McNeill, who has voted in the same precinct since the early 1990s.

“I never vote absentee – I always vote in person. I’m the one who takes the kids to the polls to vote and gives the big speech about people dying to get the right to vote. That’s why this was so frustrating.”

Like Haxby McNeill, Meador said she has no reason to believe the Election Day problem was anything but a mistake, a preliminary conclusion that election board staffers also reached after an initial inquiry.

That, however, does little to allay her concern.

“You just shouldn’t be making mistakes like this – it’s too important,” she said.

Don Mooney, another Democratic poll observer, has asked the elections board to conduct a formal investigation to confirm that the incident did not arise from “intentional or reckless tampering with voting records.”

“It is hard to understand how a properly trained poll worker could reasonably believe that so many voters had cast early votes or applied for absentee ballots during the few days between the printing of the signature book ... and Election Day,” Mooney said.

Provisional votes, nearly 206,000 of which were cast statewide last week, long have been a problematic area of Ohio elections, primarily because tens of thousands are routinely disqualified for minor missteps by voters or poll workers.

At St. Jude Church in Bridgetown, for example, voters arrived at the polls to find what James Umlauf called “two less-than-subtle endorsements” of Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney: a sign saying “Vote for religious freedom” and 50 white crosses, an anti-abortion message.

“It was reprehensible for St. Jude to take advantage of their location to promote their political agenda,” said Umlauf, who voted at the polling place.